From the outside looking in.

A new voice on the blog.  An outsider – from Yorkshire, having moving to this part of the world three and a half years ago, and now living just outside the hallowed Ely10 itself.  I'd better confess at the outset that one of my motivations in joining the blog is to try to provoke a response from Ely’s most mercurial and elusive resident artist, birder, raconteur, flat Earth denier, Bill Oddie impersonator and formerly prolific blogger.  Time will tell if I am successful, but fans of blogs written entirely in the lower case, bad puns, and sly digs at Dunc’s writing style and listing tendencies should watch this space.

The Big House, from exactly ten miles away.

Having spent a couple of years in Ely and Littleport, a move earlier this year means my local patch is now the Devil’s Dyke – a slice of scrub and calcareous grassland that slices neatly through the arable farmland south of Burwell, from the A11 north to Reach, plunging across the boundary of the Ely10 recording area around the point where it crosses the Swaffham Prior – Burwell Road.  I spend the majority of my time on the section south of this, but the mere geographical inconvenience of being outside the blog’s eponymous recording area has never stopped Dunc and Ben using it to wax lyrical about exploits from Yorkshire to France to the Gravesend beluga sanctuary, so I’m not going to let such a trifling matter stop me from waffling on.

We’ll start in the present.  The past week or so has been entertaining enough.  Saturday 22 September produced a widespread southward passage of meadow pipits – moving on a broad front across the area in small flocks.  I tallied about 150 over the course of a couple of hours along the Dyke, but given the broad front of the movement I’m sure many thousands more were passing across the breadth of the Ely10.  Naturally, this was not a localised phenomenon, and further afield at sites more conducive to vismig observations than the expanses of the Fens some very large counts rather put mine into the shade (have a look at the splendid Trektellen.nl – 11,000 at Anglers Country Park in Yorkshire, 10,000 at Winter Hill, Bolton, 7,000 at Spurn and even 500+ in Rutland).  

It wasn’t just mipits on the move though, as as my walk continued up to Reach and around various footpaths and lanes I eventually encountered a tit flock which provided only my second spotted flycatcher of the year, sallying out from the hedgerow in a manner once familiar but now, unfortunately, seen with ever decreasing frequency.

You’ll have noticed I’m not much of a photographer – I occasionally point a Lumix bridge camera (carried mostly just in case I find something exciting enough to require photographic documentation) at an obliging bird, but in the main I prefer to take records in my memory and notebook.  Old fashioned perhaps, and not ideal for those three of you that come here for the lush photography on display. 

Back on the Dyke the following Monday and a familiar low but far-carrying, growling ‘pronk, pronk’ pricked up my ears and transported me immediately to the moors of the Dark Peak.  I looked up to see a couple of hulking black silhouettes cruise overhead, shortly followed by a third.  Ravens, of course, still seeming somewhat incongruous to me over the agricultural landscape of the lowlands.  They pushed on purposefully westwards, having brightened my morning considerably.

This Saturday brought high pressure, little breeze (though still infuriatingly and resolutely from the west) and glorious sunshine.  There was frost on the ground as I set out and the fields were full of yellowhammers, grounded migrant meadow pipits and suddenly conspicuous and vocal skylarks.  The local linnet flock was ever-increasing, at least 400 birds provoked into swirling, panicked flight by a hunting sparrowhawk, while from a pylon nearby a male peregrine looked on disdainfully, patiently waiting for the foraging flock of pigeons in the fields to come just a little bit closer...